Much of what is passed about truth regarding the Catholic Church
is based on myth and sometime bigotry. Find out what the Church really
teaches.

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The Inquisition

Sooner or later, any discussion of apologetics with Fundamentalists will
address the Inquisition. To non-Catholics it is a scandal; to Catholics,
an embarrassment; to both, a confusion. It is a handy stick for Catholic-bashing,
simply because most Catholics seem at a loss for a sensible reply.
This tract will set the record straight.

There have actually been several different inquisitions. The first was
established in 1184 in southern France as a response to the Catharist heresy.
This was known as the Medieval Inquisition, and it was phased out as Catharism
disappeared.

Quite separate was the Roman Inquisition, begun in 1542. It was the least
active and most benign of the three variations.

Separate again was the infamous Spanish Inquisition, started in 1478,
a state institution used to identify conversos—Jews and Moors (Muslims)
who pretended to convert to Christianity for purposes of political or social
advantage and secretly practiced their former religion. More importantly,
its job was also to clear the good names of many people who were falsely
accused of being heretics. It was the Spanish Inquisition that, at least
in the popular imagination, had the worst record of fulfilling these duties.

The various inquisitions stretched through the better part of a millennia,
and can collectively be called "the Inquisition." This term lacks
precision when spoken of in the singular, but will suffice in a general
overview of the issue.

The Main Sources

Fundamentalists writing about the Inquisition rely on books by Henry C.
Lea (1825–1909) and G. G. Coulton (1858–1947). Each man got
most of the facts right, and each made progress in basic research, so proper
credit should not be denied them. The problem is that they did not weigh
facts well, because they harbored fierce animosity toward the Church—animosity
that had little to do with the Inquisition itself.

The contrary problem has not been unknown. A few Catholic writers, particularly
those less interested in digging for truth than in diffusing a criticism
of the Church, have glossed over incontrovertible facts and tried to whitewash
the Inquisition. This is as much a disservice to the truth as an exaggeration
of the Inquisition’s bad points. These well-intentioned, but misguided,
apologists are, in one respect, much like Lea, Coulton, and contemporary
Fundamentalist writers. They fear, while the others hope, that the facts
about the Inquisition might prove the illegitimacy of the Catholic Church.

Don’t Fear the Facts

But the facts fail to do that. The Church has nothing to fear from the
truth. No account of foolishness, misguided zeal, or cruelty by Catholics
can undo the divine foundation of the Church, though, admittedly, these
things are stumbling blocks to Catholics and non-Catholics alike.

What must be grasped is that the Church contains within itself all sorts
of sinners and knaves, and some of them obtain positions of responsibility.
Paul and Christ himself warned us that there would be a few ravenous wolves
among Church leaders (Acts 20:29; Matt. 7:15).

Fundamentalists suffer from the mistaken notion that the Church includes
only the elect. For them, sinners are outside the doors. Locate sinners,
and you locate another place where the Church is not.

Thinking that Fundamentalists might have a point in their attacks on the
Inquisition, Catholics tend to be defensive. This is the wrong attitude;
rather, we should learn what really happened, understand events in light
of the times, and then explain to anti-Catholics why the sorry tale does
not prove what they think it proves.

Phony Statistics

Many Fundamentalists believe, for instance, that more people died under
the Inquisition than in any war or plague; but in this they rely on phony "statistics" generated
by one-upmanship among anti-Catholics, each of whom, it seems, tries to
come up with the largest number of casualties.

But trying to straighten out such historical confusions can take one only
so far. As Ronald Knox put it, we should be cautious, "lest we should
wander interminably in a wilderness of comparative atrocity statistics." In
fact, no one knows exactly how many people perished through the various
Inquisitions. We can determine for certain, though, one thing about numbers
given by Fundamentalists: They are far too large. One book popular with
Fundamentalists claims that 95 million people died under the Inquisition.

The figure is so grotesquely off that one immediately doubts the writer’s
sanity, or at least his grasp of demographics. Not until modern times did
the population of those countries where the Inquisitions existed approach
95 million.

Inquisitions did not exist in Northern Europe, Eastern Europe, Scandinavia,
or England, being confined mainly to southern France, Italy, Spain, and
a few parts of the Holy Roman Empire. The Inquisition could not have killed
that many people because those parts of Europe did not have that many people
to kill!

Furthermore, the plague, which killed a third of Europe’s population,
is credited by historians with major changes in the social structure. The
Inquisition is credited with few—precisely because the number of
its victims was comparitively small. In fact, recent studies indicate that
at most there were only a few thousand capital sentences carried out for
heresy in Spain, and these were over the course of several centuries.

What’s the Point?

Ultimately, it may be a waste of time arguing about statistics. Instead,
ask Fundamentalists just what they think the existence of the Inquisition
demonstrates. They would not bring it up in the first place unless they
thought it proves something about the Catholic Church. And what is that
something? That Catholics are sinners? Guilty as charged. That at times
people in positions of authority have used poor judgment? Ditto. That otherwise
good Catholics, afire with zeal, sometimes lose their balance? All true,
but such charges could be made even if the Inquisition had never existed
and perhaps could be made of some Fundamentalists.

Fundamentalist writers claim the existence of the Inquisition proves the
Catholic Church could not be the Church founded by our Lord. They use the
Inquisition as a good—perhaps their best—bad example. They
think this shows that the Catholic Church is illegitimate. At first blush
it might seem so, but there is only so much mileage in a ploy like that;
most people see at once that the argument is weak. One reason Fundamentalists
talk about the Inquisition is that they take it as a personal attack, imagining
it was established to eliminate (yes, you guessed it) the Fundamentalists
themselves.

Not "Bible Christians"

They identify themselves with the Catharists (also known as the Albigensians),
or perhaps it is better to say they identify the Catharists with themselves.
They think the Catharists were twelfth-century Fundamentalists and that
Catholics did to them what they would do to Fundamentalists today if they
had the political strength they once had.

This is a fantasy. Fundamentalist writers take one point—that Catharists
used a vernacular version of the Bible—and conclude from it that
these people were "Bible Christians." In fact, they were not
Christians at all. Theirs was a curious religion that apparently (no one
knows for certain) came to France from what is now Bulgaria. Catharism
was a blend of Gnosticism, which claimed to have access to a secret source
of religious knowledge, and of Manichaeism, which said matter is evil.
The Catharists believed in two gods: the "good" God of the New
Testament, who sent Jesus to save our souls from being trapped in matter;
and the "evil" God of the Old Testament, who created the material
world in the first place. The Catharists’ beliefs entailed serious—truly
civilization-destroying—social consequences.

Marriage was scorned because it legitimized sexual relations, which Catharists
identified as the Original Sin. But fornication was permitted because it
was temporary, secret, and was not generally approved of; while marriage
was permanent, open, and publicly sanctioned.

The ramifications of such theories are not hard to imagine. In addition,
ritualistic suicide was encouraged (those who would not take their own
lives were frequently "helped" along), and Catharists refused
to take oaths, which, in a feudal society, meant they opposed all governmental
authority. Thus, Catharism was both a moral and a political danger.

Even Lea, so strongly opposed to the Catholic Church, admitted: "The
cause of orthodoxy was the cause of progress and civilization. Had Catharism
become dominant, or even had it been allowed to exist on equal terms, its
influence could not have failed to become disastrous." Whatever else
might be said about Catharism, it was certainly not the same as modern
Fundamentalism, and Fundamentalist sympathy for this destructive belief
system is sadly misplaced.

The Real Point

Many discussions about the Inquisition get bogged down in numbers and
many Catholics fail to understand what Fundamentalists are really driving
at. As a result, Catholics restrict themselves to secondary matters. Instead,
they should force the Fundamentalists to say explicitly what they are trying
to prove.

However, there is a certain utility—though a decidedly limited one—in
demonstrating that the kinds and degrees of punishments inflicted by the
Spanish Inquisition were similar to (actually, even lighter than) those
meted out by secular courts. It is equally true that, despite what we consider
the Spanish Inquisition’s lamentable procedures, many people preferred
to have their cases tried by ecclesiastical courts because the secular
courts had even fewer safeguards. In fact, historians have found records
of people blaspheming in secular courts of the period so they could have
their case transferred to an ecclesiastical court, where they would get
a better hearing.

The crucial thing for Catholics, once they have obtained some appreciation
of the history of the Inquisition, is to explain how such an institution
could have been associated with a divinely established Church and why it
is not proper to conclude, from the existence of the Inquisition, that
the Catholic Church is not the Church of Christ. This is the real point
at issue, and this is where any discussion should focus.

To that end, it is helpful to point out that it is easy to see how those
who led the Inquisitions could think their actions were justified. The
Bible itself records instances where God commanded that formal, legal inquiries—that
is, inquisitions—be carried out to expose secret believers in false
religions. In Deuteronomy 17:2–5 God said: "If there is found
among you, within any of your towns which the Lord your God gives you,
a man or woman who does what is evil in the sight of the Lord your God,
in transgressing his covenant, and has gone and served other gods and worshiped
them, or the sun or the moon or any of the host of heaven, which I have
forbidden, and it is told you and you hear of it; then you shall inquire
diligently [note that phrase: "inquire diligently"], and if it
is true and certain that such an abominable thing has been done in Israel,
then you shall bring forth to your gates that man or woman who has done
this evil thing, and you shall stone that man or woman to death with stones."

It is clear that there were some Israelites who posed as believers in
and keepers of the covenant with Yahweh, while inwardly they did not believe
and secretly practiced false religions, and even tried to spread them (cf.
Deut. 13:6–11). To protect the kingdom from such hidden heresy, these
secret practitioners of false religions had to be rooted out and expelled
from the community. This directive from the Lord applied even to whole
cities that turned away from the true religion (Deut. 13:12–18).
Like Israel, medieval Europe was a society of Christian kingdoms that were
formally consecrated to the Lord Jesus Christ. It is therefore quite understandable
that these Catholics would read their Bibles and conclude that for the
good of their Christian society they, like the Israelites before them, "must
purge the evil from the midst of you" (Deut. 13:5, 17:7, 12). Paul
repeats this principle in 1 Corinthians 5:13.

These same texts were interpreted similarly by the first Protestants,
who also tried to root out and punish those they regarded as heretics.
Luther and Calvin both endorsed the right of the state to protect society
by purging false religion. In fact, Calvin not only banished from Geneva
those who did not share his views, he permitted and in some cases ordered
others to be executed for "heresy" (e.g. Jacques Gouet, tortured
and beheaded in 1547; and Michael Servetus, burned at the stake in 1553).
In England and Ireland, Reformers engaged in their own ruthless inquisitions
and executions. Conservative estimates indicate that thousands of English
and Irish Catholics were put to death—many by being hanged, drawn,
and quartered—for practicing the Catholic faith and refusing to become
Protestant. An even greater number were forced to flee to the Continent
for their safety. We point this out to show that the situation was a two-way
street; and both sides easily understood the Bible to require the use of
penal sanctions to root out false religion from Christian society.

The fact that the Protestant Reformers also created inquisitions to root
out Catholics and others who did not fall into line with the doctrines
of the local Protestant sect shows that the existence of an inquisition
does not prove that a movement is not of God. Protestants cannot make this
claim against Catholics without having it backfire on themselves. Neither
can Catholics make such a charge against Protestants. The truth of a particular
system of belief must be decided on other grounds, and defamatory charges
against one side or another only generate too much heat, not enough light.